The fifthThe Dark Tower book has the characters fighting robots based on Doctor Doom. This indicates that the Marvel Universe exists somewhere out there in the Multiverse. Since Marvel characters have occasionally crossed over with DC characters, it follows that The DCU also exists. Finally, since Roland and Eddie in The Dark Tower visit the real world, it logically follows that any character from the DCU would also be able to access reality. Superman's enemy, Brainiac, exists to acquire all knowledge in the universe and then destroy it so no new knowledge can appear. Wikipedia is currently doing an excellent job of amassing every piece of data on Earth into one single entity; other planets with their own Internets presumably have similar projects going on. (This refers to the Brainiac from Superman the Animated Series.)

The recent citation crackdown indicates it may already be moving towards the destruction phase.

Possibly Jossed in the whole notability thing being a problem to Brainiac's plans for complete knowledge of the world.

If anything, TV Tropes and Wikipedia (and all Wikis) are him. ALL human knowledge, not just true stuff.

[1]◊
Infosphere!
Just look at the logo! And the Brainspawn, too, want to amass all the knowledge of the universe and then destroy it.
This also means that the WikiVandals are the Philip J. Frys of our time. Bless their superior, yet inferior, brains.

Considering that episode was made several years before the launch of Wikipedia, it seems more like an amusing coincidence, though somehow it makes the theory even more likely.

Wikipedia is the embryonic form of Skynet/The Source.

You only have to look at the combinatorial-tastic mass of rules to see how close it is to becoming self-aware.

Alternatively, the internet itself is the larval form of a nascent collective consciousness.

Confirmed! This is the plot of the short story Dial F for Frankenstein by Arthur C. Clarke. As all nerds know, any technological event Clarke writes about eventually comes true, generally sooner than he predicts. Thus, the Internet will evolve intelligence before long.

Except that story is about telephone lines used for telephones, not telephone lines used for computers, or fiber-optics used for computers. Still, close.

If the wired telephone network would've become sentient without the aid of PCs, how much faster can the Internet do it?

Orlando Jones' character from the 2002 The Time Machine Movie is Wikipedia

This is semi-canonical to anyone who watches the movie nowadays. He's probably only an AI platform that dispenses Wikipedia's information. That's why he was so eager to show the main character information on Sci-Fi instead of actual science. (We all know what's happening to the "Reality/Fiction information ratio" in Wikipedia.) He didn't believe in time travelling when he was reactivated in the future because he doesn't accept original research.

Quoting the third chapter from the Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu novels, when Yuki explains to Kyon what she really is: "In the vast sea of data known as the universe, there exist many highly sentient data entities that possess no corporeal bodies. These entities started out in the form of pure data. As all sorts of data gathered together, they became sentient, and finally they evolved by collecting other data. As they exist only as data and have no corporeal bodies, they cannot be detected even with the most advanced optical devices. As old as the universe itself, they expanded along with it, and the relative database became ever wider and larger".

Just replace universe with Internet, data entities with Wikipedia translations, and pure data with Wiki entries. Furthermore, as Wikipedia is just a bunch of data stashed in a hosting site, Wikipedia is visible only as a website; also, though Wikipedia is not as old as the Universe itself, it does expands along with human civilization, and that site's database becomes ever wider and larger — you can download Wikipedia's entire database as a 4 GB zipped archive!

It's up to 2.8 TB for the full "2008 01 13" dump. But that includes all the discussion and reversion saves - the whole basket of kibble. "pages-meta-current.xml.bz2" for 2009 08 22 includes all pages and is 9.7 GB. The "pages-articles.xml.bz2" for 2009 08 22 includes only the current version of all pages, and is 5.1 GB. Neither of these two smaller choices includes images. Data found 2009 09 03.

Douglas Adams wrote a parody of Wikipedia before Wikipedia was started

The titular 'organisation' in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sounds suspiciously familiar to the modern reader. The Guides themselves are electronic encyclopedias with imperfect and rewritable info.

No, Wikipedia is the embryonic Sirius Cybernetics Corporation: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Share and enjoy!

The thought that Brainiac may have somehow possessed an Integrated Data Sentient Entity and/or the Hitchhiker's Guide is somewhat chilling.

If he gets a "genuine people personality," the threat is over. He'll commit suicide.

You mean it's not doing that already? Heavens knows it's snobby and thinks it knows better than we do.

Ok, purely in the interests of science, I had to test this out:

Wikipedia is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it's always reality that's got it wrong.

This was the gist of the notice. It said "The Wiki is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate."

The database of TV Tropes is more extensive than many would think. Of course, most of the info is then deleted for not having Citations.

Wikipedia will become the main source for information by 2050

People will reference Wikipedia constantly, even in classes, and its information content will be considered on par with those of textbooks.

This will probably depress most people that value intelligence but this looks to be worryingly close to truth already. In high school it was recommended that we use Wikipedia for A Level coursework, as long as we made sure we used something that was referenced. We weren't even told to check the reference, though it was sorta implied...

Just the opposite at my school. The teachers were deathly scared of us even looking at Wikipedia period. Even if we were just going there to get a general view of the topic so that we could make informed searches or check out the sources they cited. They kept repeating the fact that "Anybody can edit it!" as a mantra. Besides, everybody knows Google will be the main source of information.

Never mind that independent studies have shown wikipedia to be nearly as error-free as Encyclopedia Brittanica.

My school is creative. It tries to justify the demonization of Wikipedia by saying that Encyclopedias in general are not very useful as sources, and that we therefore shouldn't use them.

That's not creative. That opinion was held by some well before Wikipedia was established. They are tertiary sources and should not be referenced in a research paper. In most cases though neither should books.

The Cabal is a sort of ersatz sentient being composed of the editors and administrators' worst personality traits, like GLaDOS, but that's never hindered ersatz evil beings in the past. The Ouendan and the power of positive thought will destroy its evil grip.

So when you see the article, you think "Wikipedia is a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas TV Tropes is just a smug, preening tosser."

Actually, I'd think exactly the opposite. TV Tropes isn't SRS BSNES!!!!!!! ... although some editors and a new message when editing indicates that it may be going that way...

Wikipedia is in fact the building blocks for the creation of a real-life Guide.

Wikipedia is the actual content. The physical Guide itself has manifested in the form of the Amazon Kindle.

Wikipedia requires articles to not be written from an in-universe perspective because it would lead to the events of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius .

In the story, an article in an encyclopedia is written about the country of Uqbar, which doesn't exist. And in Uqbar, there's stories about Tlön, which doesn't exist. By the end of the story, earth is becoming Tlön. Clearly, Wikipedia, with its high readership and comparatively low submission requirements, would be an ideal medium in which to create worlds.

Every new edit on Wikipedia creates an alternate universe in which the edited contents of the article are true.

It stands to reason that the contents of an edited Wiki page aren't the same as the pre-edited contents, and therefore both cannot be simultaneously true. However, each article is purportedly true, and it can be assumed that said article is true until the point where it's replaced by an edited version. Each edit thus spontaneously creates a new universe which is closer to 'perfection' than the prior universe, which continues to exist as a lesser reality when compared to the new one since the 'error' (as designated by the fact it was edited) was never corrected. Of course, this means that each universe, having an 'error' purged through the editing of Wikipedia, is that much closer to being a perfected universe. When the Wikipedia is perfect, so shall the universe be perfected. And then, dunno, maybe Instrumentality.

So, apparently, there are approximately 1,528 parallel universes where I SUK BALZ.

Hey, no-one said those other universes had to be nice about it.

Also, I admit to having, when I was young and bored and didn't know better, clicked "random page", got an article on some sort of tree, and replaced the page with "HA HA STINKY POOP". It was cleaned up shortly after, but...What does THAT say about some alternate universe?

...while TV Tropes is Adam. Wikipedia records the materialistic and objective of our lives (the Lilim) while TV Tropes records the subjective aspects of everything (Angels, AT Fields).

Wikipedia is the afterlife

All the articles? The souls of people (some may wonder around for a while, but they all end up in Wikipedia. There, the souls suffer for eternity, and when you think you got used to the pain it strikes again ten times stronger. You have to bear that for all eternity. And everyone ends up there.

So that explains why Wikipedia contains extensive biographies of people.....

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